Toy Box Leadership

Ron Hunter, Michael E. Waddell

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781418570828
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Reach back into your childhood and recapture the leadership principles you learned from your favorite toys.

Authors Ron Hunter and Michael E. Waddell take a nostalgic look back into their childhood toy boxes to revisit the valuable leadership and life lessons we all unintentionally learned during playtime. While these lessons started in fun, as adults, we've complicated the principles of leadership - cluttering them with popular trends and theories.

Toy Box Leadership clears away the clutter and takes listeners back to the simple and essential roots of the most effective and unchanging leadership best practices. In this book, you will learn:

• what Lego bricks can teach you about building your business through connection;
• how Slinky Dog demonstrates the value of patience when you're growing your organization;
• what every kid learned from the Little Green Army Men that can be used in business strategy;
• and many more playful and insightful lessons.

Whether you still feel young at heart or your childhood seems to be a distant memory, Toy Box Leadership will bring you back to the place where all important life lessons began to reinvigorate your ability to influence and lead others in the playground of life.

^{1 LEGO® Bricks}

RELATIONSHIPS

Building Begins with Connecting

What would make a corporate lawyer give up his six-figure salary to make thirteen dollars an hour? One word: LEGO^®. It all started on Christmas 1978 in Colville, Washington, when five-year-old Nathan Sawaya unwrapped his first set of LEGO^® bricks. As the years went by, his collection grew, and his family’s living room transformed into a giant “LEGO^® city.” At age nine, Nathan experienced a life-changing event. His family happened upon a traveling LEGO^® tour at the Alameda Square Shopping Center in Denver. Inspired by seeing the grand scale of the White House and the Washington Monument built out of those little bricks he loved, he went back home and built a replica of the Oregon state capitol.

As an adult, Nathan’s LEGO^® interest was merely a hobby, until 2004, when he entered a contest, sponsored by the LEGOLAND^® theme park in San Diego, to find the country’s best adult LEGO^® builders. He won the contest and left his high-salary job to become a LEGO^® master builder, assembling elaborate replicas. Making only one-fifth his lawyer’s salary didn’t matter to him because he was living his dream.

The history of the LEGO^® brick dates back to 1932, in Billund, Denmark, where Ole Kirk Christiansen opened a new carpentry business making stepladders, ironing boards, and little wooden toys. Christiansen called his toys “Lego,” a name derived from the Danish words leg godt meaning “play well.” In 1942, the LEGO^® factory burned to the ground. This unfortunate event ended up being a positive one, though, because when Christiansen rebuilt, he chose a plastic injection-molding machine instead of wood to build his toys. In 1949, Christiansen introduced the Automatic Binding Brick to Europe with moderate success. Everything changed in 1961, when the LEGO^® bricks were introduced to North America and became an immediate hit. (The LEGO^® Group refers to their toys in the plural as LEGO^® bricks, not LEGOs^®. We will respect their wishes within the chapter.)

It is estimated that more than 235 billion LEGO^® parts have been manufactured since the first Automatic Binding Brick was molded in 1949. Today, LEGO^® is more than just simple building blocks. LEGO^® is toys, theme parks, games, movies, computers, and robots; all sold in more than 115 different countries. Now the fourth-largest toy manufacturer in the world, LEGO^® Group employs more than five thousand people and produces more than thirty-three thousand bricks every minute, totaling 16 billion bricks annually. That translates into annual sales exceeding $1.1 billion. Fortune magazine recognized this success in 2000, when it named LEGO^® the “Toy of the Century.”

The popularity of LEGO^® bricks results from their versatility. You remember that feeling you had as a child imagining the endless possibilities of what you could build with that pile of LEGO^® bricks? Would you venture a guess as to how many ways you can arrange six eight-studded LEGO^® bricks? In an astounding 915,103,765 different positions. Now, how many days would that occupy your child?

If you can dream it, the LEGO^® Group believes that you can build it. Think about the world records involving LEGO^® construction: a 92.5-foot tower using 500,000 bricks; a 4,626-foot-long structure utilizing more than three million components; or a life-size car built out of 650,000 bricks and weighing more than a ton. Each record began by merely connecting two little bricks.

LEGO^® bricks provide the essence of this leadership lesson on Relationships: Building begins with connecting. In business, if you do not connect—with your customer, with your coworkers, with your vendors—you are out of business. Some tremendous products have failed to connect, allowing inferior products to surpass them in sales.

Relationships are the building blocks of any organization. Relationships precede market position, sales goals, research and development, or success in the boardroom. Real influential power relates by connecting. Look at the heart of any successful organization and you will find strong relationships that began because someone cared enough to connect. Relationships or connections will exist at every level in varying degrees and in multiple directions. Connections exist with equal importance inside and outside the organization.

Think of all the connecting that occurs in a single day at your office: people to people, business to business, employees to vision, workgroups to ideas, or management to principles. We connect through e-mail, phone calls, intercoms, heads ducking into doorways, written correspondence, and meetings. And these personal connections represent just a modest percentage of the total connections our organizations actually perform. Think for a minute about how your corporate identity, public relations, and overall image impact others through various means of connections. Each one of these connections is a vital building block for your company’s dream.

LEGO^® bricks teach us that each individual is interdependent on the next connection for success. The properly placed LEGO^® within a structure provides strength and substance and adds to the overall structure. Placing each person so he or she connects properly results in the healthy utilization of human resources. Properly connecting a person within an organization is just as critical to the organization as properly placing a LEGO^® within a structure. As you remember, one LEGO^® stuck in the wrong place can ruin a perfectly good castle.

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Leaders understand the complexity of relationships, and they work to positively develop them.

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Leaders understand the complexity of relationships, and they work to positively develop them. As the architect of strong relationships in your organization, you must recognize these three LEGO^® leadership categories: Connectional Value, Connectional Ability, and Connectional Failures.

#1: LEGO^® Leaders Recognize Connectional Value

Ken Blanchard knows about the value of connecting. He says, “In the past a leader was a boss. Today’s leaders must be partners with their people—they no longer can lead solely based on positional power.”¹. In other words, your relationships are more important than your position.

Connection is important in every area and at every stage of life. Whether in your neighborhood or at work, you will benefit from building any positive relationship. Whether you are the top dog or the new kid on the block, it is valuable to start making those connections now. Every leader you know has reached that point by making the right connections.

Partnering with your people means treating them with respect and value. Recognizing their value often begins with understanding their daily job and what they have to deal with to perform it properly. Try working alongside them, if possible, for a while. If their job is technical and not possible for you to do, then observe them while listening to their thoughts on improving their work area or policies affecting them. Get a sense of what they do, what they endure, and what motivates them. If you can energize them, then you have connected. Ivory towers, strong autocratic styles, and smugness among leadership inhibit connection on many levels.

A legal secretary was eating in the cafeteria with other secretaries, a couple of associates, and a partner. This partner understood and possessed the ability to connect. Another partner, passing by and seeing his colleague eating with everyone else, paused in the doorway and chided, “You’re slumming it today, huh?” This personality type fails to connect, kills morale, and fosters resentment. He tears down more than he ever builds. He’s that LEGO^® brick that causes your castle to crumble. Good leaders appreciate the power of professional relationships once they realize the growth possibilities stemming from that connection.

Connecting Builds a Strong Foundation

Nathan Sawaya’s largest LEGO^® project to date is a replica of a Chris Craft Speedster. It took him more than 180 hours, and he used almost 250,000 bricks. It is more than ten feet in length, and it holds the world record for the largest LEGO^® boat. When commenting on his method, he said that building with LEGO^® bricks takes a “bottom-up approach.”

The same is true with relationships. When you make a connection, it lays a foundation upon which you can build. The more connections you make, the stronger your foundation becomes and the higher you can build. Strong connections prompt people to come to the rescue of fellow team members rather than throwing them under the bus. The bus’s bumper has enough dents in it—get people working more closely together and you will see greater accomplishments from cultivating a stronger foundation for your team.

Connecting Unleashes the Power of Synergy

Synergy is a word that is often misused. Synergy is combining the efforts of two or more entities resulting in a greater sum than individual efforts could have achieved. Former prime minister of Israel Golda Meir understood the power of synergy, stating that she “never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.”

Synergy was typified in January 2007 as Steve Jobs presented the iPhone, which was a result of the cooperative efforts of Cingular/AT&T, Yahoo, and Google, to name a few. Verizon passed on making this connection, so Steve Jobs moved on to connect with another powerhouse, AT&T, and ultimately created one incredible gadget that set a new standard in communication.

Connecting Utilizes the Strength of Unity

Board ethics tell us that when a board passes a vote, and a minority votes against it, the minority should vigorously support the action as if they voted for it themselves. Unity is accomplished when one sets aside self and places the greater good ahead of personal agendas. LEGO^® bricks are at their best when you step back and see the entire structure rather than the individual bricks. Cultivate the spirit of unity within your organization by helping people understand the stark difference between unity and uniformity. In any environment, connection comes from unity, not uniformity.

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In any environment, connection comes from unity, not uniformity.

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The 1992 movie The Power of One is about a young English boy named P. K. living in South Africa during the 1940s. As he grows up, P. K. becomes passionate about teaching the natives English. After losing his parents and his closest friend, he is disillusioned until he sees the great effects of his English language schools among the people. The closing scene renders this inspirational statement: “Changes can come from the power of many, but only when many come together to form that which is invincible . . . the power of one.”

#2: LEGO^® Leaders Recognize Connectional Ability

LEGO^® bricks don’t join with others simply by chance. Likewise, the best connections don’t happen by accident. Pouring out a box of LEGO bricks will not produce a castle; you will just have a pile of bricks. Similarly, relationships at their best are designed, intentional, connected, and built. While many leaders appreciate the relationships in their organization, they fail to connect the appropriate blocks in the right direction.

LEGO^® bricks are not like Velcro, latching randomly, even where they are not meant to connect. LEGO designs are intentional in their connections, allowing someone who can see the big picture to pull all the parts together. Bringing it together requires the ability to connect the team and to connect with the team. What makes these connections possible? The answers can be found in the three distinct reasons LEGO bricks connect so well.

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Bringing it together requires the ability to connect the team and to connect with the team.

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LEGO^® Bricks Are Reliable

It is not coincidental that LEGO^® bricks are among the most reliable toys in the world. Technicians perform a variety of tests on LEGO^® elements, and they find that only about eighteen out of every million, or 0.000018 percent, fail to pass their quality assurance tests. You know LEGO^® bricks can be trusted before you start to build. Likewise, every good relationship is fundamentally based on trust. This is true in marriages, parenting, friendships, serving in a military unit, and working with colleagues. Work-place trust begins with the administration and ultimately the CEO. Policy affects trust. Mid-level management affects trust. If mid-level management does not implement company policy or direction as if they fully believe it, then their team will lose trust in the leader and the direction the organization is heading. When the manager or leader is away, do employees respond the same as if she were still there? If not, it reflects on the lack of trust in their leadership, and the lack of personal responsibility the employees feel for the success of their team, and by extension, their trust of company-wide policies.

Reliability means you trust your workers enough not to look over their shoulders. This lack of trust by management often results in micromanagement, which will further erode the morale of the organization. Micromanagement as a leadership style devalues the overall team and is not far removed from a dictatorship. It implies to the team that they cannot be trusted to do their job without the ever-watchful eye of management.

Likewise, workers must be able to trust you as their leader. You must earn that trust and can just as easily forfeit it. You earn it by getting in the midst of difficult problems and not passing the buck. Your reliability translates into your followers becoming more reliable. No matter your political party affiliation, you had to admire Mayor Rudy Giuliani on September 11. He did not delegate others to assess damages or wait for New Yorkers to take care of themselves. He put on a dust mask and immediately hit the streets, with the people of his office following him. New Yorkers were inspired by his example, earning him trust that horrid day and in the weeks that followed. Those days of connecting may very well hav...